"Breeding-back" aims to restore or immitate extinct animals by selective breeding. This blog provides general information, the facts behind myths and news from various projects.

Wednesday, 1 April 2015

Living near-aurochs relicts found in Poland?

It’s not
uncommon that web or field research unearths some surprisingly aurochs-like or,
in terms of dedomestication, spectacular breeds. But these news struck me the
most. Hold on your horns.

It seems that
aurochs enthusiasts involved in some rewilding projects have, looking for
primitive landraces in Poland, discovered a really remarkable population of
cattle. Farmer Julius Woźniak from Łódź is the owner
of a herd of about 20 cattle that show significant similarity to the aurochs:
they are comparably large (bulls reach about 165cm at the shoulders, so they
are about the size of Sayaguesa or a little larger), the horns are nearly
completely aurochs-like just slightly thinner and rarely some deviant shapes
show up, and the colour is perfectly aurochs-like – bulls are black with an eel
stripe, light muzzle ring and dark, prominent forelocks. Cows are of a
reddish-brown colour with darker shades just like in some Maronesa and Heck
cows. Occasionally there are black cows, just like Anton Schneeberger reported
in the 16th century. Deviant colours do not appear – only some
calves show an ashy grey tone that disappears later on. Those cattle are kept in
a very traditional manner – they wander around freely all the year round, where
they thrive in clear forests and sometimes also visit the mountains. Only when
the owner wants to seize them, he goes into the forest and looks for them with a
his dogs and gathers them together. He only uses their meat and coat, he never
milked one of them. “They almost give no milk. And I would never try to milk
one of those cows. They are nasty beasts”, Wozniak says. In some rural regions
of Poland there are still wolf packs that regularly kill farm animals, and it
also happens that some calves get poached by the wolves, but it is said that
the cows show a great will to defend their calves and surround them in circles
when they are in danger. Adult animals do not have to fear them. Wozniak once
witnessed such a wolf attack “I saw two or three wolves teasing one of my adult
bulls. He tossed one of them into the air about four or five metres wide. Then
the wolves were gone”. The remark that he has more than one adult bull is
interesting – perhaps there is mating competition between the bulls, and
therefore some form of natural selection.

This kind immediately caught the attention of the researchers. Wozniak
allowed them to take hair samples from one young bull that was about to be
slaughtered, and they delivered it to a lab at the University of Warsaw, under
the guidance of a certain Prof. Rubenstein.
The lab is going to test and compare the samples to “other Polish rural cattle,
milk and beef cattle, one Iberian breed [I don’t know which one] and Heck
cattle [I wonder for which purpose…]”. Rubenstein says: “If it turns out that
these bull has any phylogenetic markers, be it mitochondrial, Y chromosomal or
whatever, that are not present in any other European cattle, it would be a
strong hint that the cattle of Mr. Wozniak are of a unique and ancient origin.
We also want to do a molecular clock analysis to get some clue when this breed
diverged from other cattle”. I hope that this sample is representative enough.
A priori, I rule out that these cattle are the result of local domestication.
But, considering that Poland, as most of my readers will know, was the latest
refuge of the aurochs, it may be that these cattle are the result of massive
late introgression of the aurochs and that they have been kept isolated from
other cattle for a long time.

How credible is that scenario? I think it’s not unlikely. Remember that
the last (and probably already mixed) wild horses in Poland were kept in the Zamość game park until 1806 when
they were donated for economical reasons to a number of farmers in the Bilgoraj
region. Cis van Vuure in his 2005 book pointed to the possibility that one or
even more game parks might have aurochs even past 1627 because of an ambiguous
letter from that time. So perhaps there were still some small aurochs herds
around during the middle or even later half of the 17th century. I
can imagine that there was a similar scenario like that with the wild horses.
Maybe one of these game parks was not interested in keeping them anymore and
donated them to some neighbouring farmers. Aurochs were surely not easy to
handle, but looking at how Wozniak keeps his cattle it might be less
problematic, also considering that they were probably mixed with some local
cattle that must have been primitive anyway (perhaps like those rural Romanian
cattle?). It might be well possible that some of these farmers lived in regions
that were comparably isolated and that these aurochs hybrids subsequently barely mixed with other cattle. And these semi-wild circumstances under which
they were kept probably preserved a lot of typical aurochs characteristics.

What Wozniak
told us fits this idea: He said that this breed (or lets call it a population)
does not have a particular name. His family has been breeding them for
generations and he knows only of two other breeders – he has not seen these
cattle in any other region yet. The two aurochs enthusiasts have shown him
photos of Maronesa, Sayaguesa and Heck cattle. Wozniak said that they look
similar but he does not think that these cattle are related to his.

I am incredibly
exited and I can’t wait for the results of the genetic analysis. And even if
these cattle do not turn out as the descendants of the last aurochs on earth,
it would be a remarkable breed anyway and very useful for “breeding back”.

I was provided
with some decent photos of these cattle. If you want to have a look, go here,
here and here.

6 comments:

Imagine beimg such a cattle nerd that you make april fools pranks about how they found a breed who is slightly more geometrically resembling an aurochs than modern existing like its a huge deal, then other cattle nerds go like "oooohhh no you didnt, you got me" no offense Its just an interesting phenomena :P

The big deal on these imaginary cattle is not that they would resemble the aurochs more authentically, but that they would be the direct descendants of the last living aurochs and closer to those than anything else. Btw, I got the idea for this April 1st joke from the internet "paleosphere", where it has become tradition that bloggers try to fool people with such imaginary exciting discoveries. I thought it would be fun also to do something like that.

About this blog

This blog is on everything related to the so-called “breeding-back” of extinct animals: From the extinct animals themselves, over their often domestic descendants and dedomestication to news and facts about various breeding-back projects, reports and photos from my own breeding-back related trips. I try to have a balanced and fact-based approach to this subject and to dismantle many of the popular myths. Enjoy!

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About me

My major interest always have been extinct animals, from dinosaurs to Pleistocene megafauna and more recent extinctions. Besides that I am interested in evolution, genetics and ecology.
I am also an amateur animal artist, making drawings and models mostly of extinct animals.